The standard-issue alien-abduction thriller gains a few paranormal touches and a taste of the living dead in Dark Skies, a sometimes hair-raising riff on all the Communions that have come before.

It’s a passably chilling bit of nonsense that builds on the past, the tropes of the genre, and relies on them for the odd jolt and the occasional ironic laugh.

Yes, the aliens are abducting us, but only those who didn’t heed the warnings of Signs.

Keri Russell and Josh Hamilton play struggling suburbanites — she’s a real estate agent, he’s an unemployed architect — who suddenly have weird lights, weirder noises, nightly kitchen rearranging and unseen threats to their two boys to go along with a battered marriage and a mortgage in arrears. Dark Skies is about how they and their confused kids handle all this.

Not very well, as you might expect.

As the episodes pile up — catatonic fits, mass bird collisions, strange bruising on the kids that has the neighbors sure they’re nut-job child-abusers — you’d expect a mania to set in. Daniel and Lacy can only manage confusion and solutions borrowed from Paranormal Activity (surveillance cameras), Night of the Living Dead (barricading the windows) and every other modern horror movie. (Internet searches, where The Truth, or at least the conspiracy, is out there.)

That last step delivers the movie’s most fascinating character, an expert (J.K. Simmons) on visitations whose resignation and exhaustion at their fate, which mirrors his, seems earned. Lacy and Daniel seem beaten before they start.

Visual effects man turned writer-director Scott Stewart has turned away from the Legion and Priest D-movies and patched together something of an expertly shot and cut mash-up. He’s good at managing tension, and the script doles out the requisite shocks at decent intervals.

What’s missing is that Insidious empathy, the sense of parents terrified for their kids, a terror that the viewer shares — if only we’d been given more reason to care or a surer sense that they do.

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